Crossroads
by Nerumi H
Summary: "Are you sure you don't want me to drive?" In summary, don't make Dell the designated road trip driver. Dell/Yuuma


.title.: **Crossroads**

.summary.: **"Are you _sure_ you don't want me to drive?" In summary, don't make Dell the designated road trip driver.**

.characters.: **VY2 Yuuma/Honne Dell**

.warnings.: **Dell language, pretty much.**

.a/n.:** I wrote this when on vacation, while we were driving through the mountain passes...it's terrifying. You wonder how some of the roads passed inspection.**

**Also the title, which I suppose I will be keeping until I think of something that doesn't actually imply there's a plot here, was made up by Your Truth Is My Lie**

**This is our ship after all.**

**Also this is a good ship, everyone should try it out so I can read more of it.**

**X**

Dell doesn't like Yuuma's attitude.

It's one that says, _it's not as hard as it looks, Dell_—while he _has_ to know by now that yes, it's as hard as it looks.

He should know this by how Dell is gripping the steering wheel, like if he gives it the slightest bit of air it'll get a mind of its own and careen them off the path. On every turn he's smashing down the brakes and screeching around the bend on what sounds like the bare metal rims of the wheels.

Dell _really _doesn't like Yuuma's attitude.

It says, "Calm down, already," with every time he rests a hand on Dell's and nudges at his knuckles to try and get them to loosen up and go back to their original colour and not this bone-white.

Yuuma says, for real out loud now, "Are y'sure you don't want me t' drive?"

A cringe, completely ungovernable in how much it grinds his teeth together and tenses his shoulders til they may as well be made of stone, makes its display on him when a truck swerves around them.

"I'm fine. For fuck's sake, stop asking me that."

The mountain walls lean in on them, not for the first time, on a tight hairpin of a downhill corner. Yuuma thinks of how the car's tires are screaming the way he bets Dell wants to. It makes him smile to himself, then he quickly morphs it into a kinder, more public one. "Everythin' about you begs to differ, Dell."

"I'm always like this," Dell retorts, the gathered frustration all in his voice. The two-way road straightens out for a couple dozen meters, but with the speed he takes it, the moment to recuperate is soon over.

"I'd notice if that was true..." Yuuma feels like he should advise him that going 30 over the limit then murdering the wheels on all these loops is a terrible idea and is doing more harm to his well being than helping it. But knowing Dell, he either already realised that but was too high-strung now to stop it, or he would pretend he'd already realised it. Then invent an excuse as to why the other way (that everyone else was doing) wasn't going to work for him. Yuuma sighs. Dell was a bit too obsessed with being right, even when it was about him giving himself cardiac arrest (or, well, lung cancer, for that matter). The wish for Dell to finally drop the ego and clue in to the fact that he could be wrong floats to Yuuma's mind again, for definitely not the first time.

Another turn twists the cracked road and Dell has hardly even reached the very brunt of it before he starts to press on the brakes. To try and calm him or just reassure him that Yuuma was still here—and if he kept driving like this he'd kill _two_ people—Yuuma lowers his hand onto Dell's thigh. He realises his error when the gesture just makes Dell jump and slam the brakes the final inch so they hurtle to a scraping stop.

Yuuma glances out his window. The overhanging rocky edge is nearly touching the edge of his door. Luckily, no one is behind them to fall victim to Dell's ridiculous driving.

"Dell, I know y'need a break, but we can't do it here," Yuuma says, smirking as his vantage gave him a perfect view of the atrociously pale, frozen figure of Dell. His eyes looked especially crimson against the light-coloured backdrop of both his skin and the misty distant valley beside him.

It takes that phrase and one other squeeze of his thigh to finally snap Dell out of it—and the first thing he does is fire a rather sharp glare at the other man. However before Yuuma can assure him that he was only kidding, something past him had caught Dell's interest.

Yuuma follows his gaze to the rock wall beside him.

"You know what that net is for?" Dell doesn't gesture—too busy making sure the steering wheel won't weasel away from him to let go for even a second—but Yuuma knows what he's talking about. An elastic knit net, covering the uneven surface and tethered at the bottom.

"Do you? It's for fucking avalanches," Dell groans and growls in an impressive tone he'd long ago claimed as his trademark, while easing off the brakes and onto the gas in a badly timed effort to get rolling again. The jutting boulder, net and all, almost scrapes the vehicle. Yuuma doesn't know whether to be relieved or terrified now that they are once again no longer static.

He takes a breath. "Avalanches rarely happen here, Dell, we don' need t'run from them—"

"If they were rare they wouldn't have to put a net," he insists with absolutely no mind, again, to the needle on the MPH dial. It's swinging back and forth across the numbers like a metronome. He's too stressed to even smoke.

Somehow that realisation really bothers Yuuma. That Dell is genuinely upset—and also that they are in a genuinely shitty situation right now.

Yuuma spares himself the second to bit the inside of his lip, retracting his hands into the safety of his lap. It doesn't feel very safe, though. None of it does. They careen around what he hopes for the thousandth time would be the last corner—but arrive upon the wake of another.

Yuuma...really doesn't like Dell's attitude.

And now, the feeling isn't exactly mutual.

Dell, even through his deadly fixed glare on the road that just wouldn't become as straight and calm and flat and avalanche-repellant as he wants it to be, notices Yuuma moving away. His normally eternally-cool demeanor has been inching away with each tetchy retort and tipping turn. He huffs.

"If you don't want me to drive, you should have told me before we got here."

"I didn't think you'd be so..." Yuuma dwindles off, shrugging and carefully waving a demonstrative hand instead. He latches his fingers into the armrest as they turn. "You're getting worse..."

Dell would have rolled his eyes if he wasn't so focused of the path. They are almost out of here, anyway. Probably. He is just waiting, at every road's twist, that he'll be confronted with a crumbling rock face, another unlucky car, or a turn that is a little too narrow for this—fishtail—method. His arms are beginning to hurt. "Well we can't exactly stop anywhere now, Yuuma, remember."

"I just want y'to slow down," Yuuma says carefully. Patiently. As usual.

Dell momentarily teases the idea that this was all a rouse to finally break Yuuma, but he knows that isn't true. He is actually scared out of his wits. That's a sour realisation. ...He sure hopes someone out there is happy about this, because he certainly isn't.

At once, as he speeds through the path and tries to relinquish the deathgrip on the steering wheel, even the slightest bit as if to prove a point to himself that he was FINE, Dell finds himself unable to release his hold and that he is tinged with an ounce of guilt about Yuuma. Also a repercussion of irritation BECAUSE he was guilty.

"We're not going to DIE up here," Dell insits through his teeth more-or-less directed at Yuuma.

"I should be tellin' you that." When Dell sacrifices a second of attention to the road (a second in which they could have, well, DIED) and looks at Yuuma, he is smiling feebly, the expression perfectly honest on his handsome face. Still the hellish driving is having an effect on it.

The car swerves steeply into the first space Dell can find between the road and the rock wall that allows the slight amount of room; he ignores the potential hazards he is pulling right in the way of and shoves open his door.

Yuuma swivels in his seat to watch Dell cross in front of the vehicle, open the passenger side as wide as he can without hitting the mountainside, and climb into Yuuma's lap with a shove to his side.

"Go. Drive," he snaps to the other man's clueless expression. "You want to so much? Go."

It takes only moment before another airy smile crosses Yuuma's face, realisation with it. So, he'd finally given up...

And when a car rushes around the bend, swerving too fast around them to even let the other driver any time to lay on the horn, Dell's fingers crush into Yuuma's shoulders and he looks on the verge of shrieking.

"Hurry up and move!" Dell yells instead while Yuuma tries not to smirk too much at how afraid Dell was. This may be the last time he'd see him like this—but given the situation, there isn't much opportunity to bask in the display behind his dropped guards. Not like he would have much, either, since this isn't a side of himself that Dell is willingly showing off, and he'd do better to just not indicate he'd noticed at all.

But he can, however, kiss Dell on the cheek rapidly enough so he won't waste any time and so Dell notices it, before he miraculously manages to sidle into the driver's seat without smacking his head—more than twice—on the ceiling.

He pulls the vehicle from their precarious placing, to the tune of Dell immediately lighting up a cigarette. Yuuma wouldn't be surprised if he had three or more in his hand at once.

Driving along the snaking road, Yuuma realises he isn't having any trouble at all. The corners were tight, but as long as he was at a decent speed and control...

He glances at Dell. His eyes are shut as he anxiously sucks the life out of the cigarette.

Yuuma reaches over and touches Dell's arm to snap him out of it again. By chance and maybe by the combined memory of all the other times Yuuma had touched him so delicately like that, Dell's eyes open. The icy-looking crimson focused with a hardly-appealing, dangerous stare. Apparently still on edge.

Yuuma tells him carefully, "It's not so bad."

Dell gives an indignant drag on his cigarette, smoking up the inside of the car, and the haughty expression that has now once again found a home on his face tells Yuuma in advance that Dell's answer is going to be his typical snotty self. He shrugs, reclines in his chair, and says, "God, step on it, will you?"


End file.
